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The reshuffling of Blue Origin’s management continues

With the announcement yesterday that another high level executive was leaving the company — the third in less than a month — Blue Origin does appear to be making major changes in its management as well as its entire organizational structure.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith told employees in an email on Friday that Mike Eilola, the company’s senior vice president of operations since 2021, “is leaving the company for personal reasons” on Nov. 3 and will have his unit split into two new organizations.

Eilola’s departure follows plans announced last month by Bezos to replace Smith, who has been Blue Origin’s CEO since 2017, with longtime Amazon executive Dave Limp by the end of the year. And Brent Sherwood, the head of what had been the company’s research and development unit, will depart next month, Reuters has reported.

This is not the only management restructuring. It has also shifted its lunar lander project into its own division, as well as created a new separate division for developing in-space robotic servicing and orbital tug products.

It finally appears that Jeff Bezos is taking action to get his company working again, after more than a half decade of non-achievement since Bob Smith took over in 2017. Hopefully these changes finally will produce results.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

7 comments

  • Surly

    Perhaps the first sentence should read ‘…leaving the company…’

  • Surly: Yup. Now fixed. Thank you.

  • pzatchok

    I wonder if the shuffle is just to give hope to past and future investors?

    Basically make it look like they are doing something and hope for more investment and government non production contracts.

  • pzatchok: As far as I know, the only investor in Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos. These changes are likely to give him hope that something might finally start happening.

  • Concerned

    What’s the quickest way to become a billionaire?
    Start as a trillionaire and found a rocket company.
    (Old joke adjusted for inflation)
    Bezos is right on schedule.

  • Richard M

    You should read the Blue Origin subreddit and discord, which have a fair number of BO employees. They’re positively delighted.

    Looks like this may be the end for the Honeywell Mafia.

  • GeorgeC

    If the wikipedia data on the BE-4 and Raptor are accurate, then the Raptor has improved so much that it now has a larger thrust than the BE-4.

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